Telecom minister shared "Good news" for Telegram, WhatsApp, and other services

Over-the-top (OTT) players and apps were always going to be beyond the ambit of the new Telecom Bill, but Ashwini Vaishnaw, the Minister of IT and Telecom, has clarified this by stating that the existing legislation will still govern these apps. The IT Act of 2000 governed over-the-top (OTT) content and it still does. The recently passed telecom bill by the Parliament does not address over-the-top (OTT) services.

“OTT has been regulated by the IT Act of 2000 and continues to be regulated by the IT Act. There is no coverage of OTT in the new telecom bill passed by the Parliament,” Vaishnaw told a news source.  

The official comments on the issue will ease the concerns raised by the app makers.

The new bill has received its nod from both Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha and now it is awaiting presidential assent before it becomes the law.

The Indian Telegraph Act of 1885, the Wireless Telegraphy Act of 1933, and the Telegraph Wires (Unlawful Possession) Act of 1950 will be replaced by the new bill.

As per news source, Meta’s Director and Head of India Public Policy, Shivnath Thukral, last week, expressed concerns over the Telecom bill in an internal email to colleagues. The bill that was passed by Parliament did not contain any references to OTT or OTT platforms.  

But it did mention terms like ‘telecommunication services', 'messages,' and 'telecommunications identifier', which can be applied to OTT platforms. This meant that the OTT platforms may have come under the ambit of the new Telecom Bill.

The legislation will also allow the government to intercept messages and disclose them to investigative agencies in an “intelligible format” and set encryption standards. This may mean that the bill may threaten end-to-end encrypted messaging services offered by the likes of Signal and WhatsApp.

Meanwhile, the Broadband India Forum (BIF), an industry body that has Amazon, Google, Meta, Netflix and OneWeb among its members, said that a clarity in this regard “will help achieve increased acceleration of internet/broadband penetration and will provide a huge impetus to the growth of the digital economy.”